The Great Oscars Screw-Up of 2017 Is Still Taking Names

Four days later, and The Great Oscars Fuck-Up of 2017 is still takin' names, baby. First, Warren Beatty was dragged through the mud, then his co-presenter, Faye Dunaway, who was actually the one who misread/misstated La La Land as the Best Picture winner. This is the Internet, so naturally we cast a wide net in theorizing and assigning blame. Was it the work of an underpaid intern with a grudge? Leo DiCaprio assuming his rightful throne as The Phantom of the Oscars™? More pressingly, how many people did Damien Chazelle kill on his way home that night?

We now know (most of) this protracted, silly story that we'll totally be able to laugh about one day. (I mean, most of us are laughing already.) The basic facts are these: Accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers's two representatives, Brian Cullinan and Martha Ruiz stood backstage on either side of the stage during the ceremony, with a set of envelopes each containing the winners of the categories. As a safeguard, both had identical sets of winners cards, and both had memorized each winner just in case something were, by some act of a vengeful God of chaos, to go wrong.

Cullinan was the one tasked with giving Beatty and Dunaway the Best Picture envelope. Instead, he whiffed it hard, and gave them the envelope for the already-announced Best Actress category, which Emma Stone won for her work in La La Land. Beatty, visibly confused onstage by the card and the obvious error, tipped the card to Dunaway, who thought Beatty was doing a bad bit and just called out the movie name she saw on the card right away: La La Land. A shitshow followed.

So! No one's really 100% to blame. It was a giant mix-up that needed so many things to go wrong to actually occur, and it just so happens... they all did. Like a Rube Goldberg machine of madness. Even when the Academy FOR SURE adds new safeguards for next year, this is a giant anomaly that could probably never happen again the way it did, even if they tried.

When Dunaway called out La La Land, what was Ruiz to do? Blast an airhorn while pointing instead at the Moonlight crew?

Except, someone is kinda to blame more so than the rest: PWC's lovable, lumbering accountant Brian Cullinan. A thorough audit shows that, just prior to handing out That Envelope, the starstruck professional had been palling around and tweeting a photo of Emma Stone, distracting him from his one duty of the evening.

On the one hand: fine. Actions have consequences. On the other: Why the hell was Ruiz blackballed too? She was all the way over on the other side of the stage. She couldn't have known or prevented what was about to happen. When Dunaway called out La La Land, what was she to do? Tackle the producers to the ground on their way up to accept their awards? Blast an airhorn while pointing instead at the Moonlight crew? Cullinan messed up, but Ruiz being yanked off Oscar Night is bogus. Bring back Martha Ruiz!

Anyway, life will go on and the Oscars will be back next year, except this time nothing remotely interesting will be allowed to happen and we'll get approximately 700 jokes in the monologue about this whole thing. See you there.

UPDATE: OK, so this was also kinda Ruiz's fault, per the stage manager, Gary Natoli, who says just hours before the ceremony Cullinan and Ruiz, in the event of a mistake "you don’t need to check with each other. You need to immediately go out and rectify the situation, ideally before the wrong winners get to the mic." Who knows why Ruiz locked up! Who knows why Natoli's account–that he was standing next to Jimmy Kimmel backstage–directly contradicts Kimmel's, who says he was sitting in the audience next to Matt Damon, preparing for a scripted end to the show? We'll never know how deep this thing really goes.

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